Caitlyn Jenner is a clueless bint, so no, I'm not surprised in the least that it's taken her this long to notice that the Party of Hate hates 'her kind'. "Yes dearie, you'll just have to use the Men's Room, because you might rape little girls if we let you use the Ladies' Room."

What I want to know is, if transmen have to use the Ladies Room, what's to stop het/cis male rapists from coming in there? Are we all going to be issued Bathroom IDs with our genetic sex-designation? I suppose it would be easiest to just have all that information on the chips implanted in our hands and foreheads at birth.

> What I want to know is, if transmen have to use the Ladies Room, what's to stop het/cis male rapists from coming in there?

If you can get a backer of the bathroom-policing proposals to answer this, I would be fascinated to hear.

I used to really wonder this. I used to think this was such a sheerly illogical piece that possibly the proponents hadn't thought about this and possibly it would sway them. I usually get a subject change, or "that's not the point", or "*sigh* they can barge into the bathroom today, you know" -- i.e. always a dodge of some kind.

I'm afraid what's actually going on with proponents is that they know that trans men mostly won't go in because they won't be safe, and know that consequently the "camouflage for male creeps" thing doesn't come up.

It IS sheerly illogical, but that is no surprise from people too willfully ignorant to grok evolution, climate change, or the principle of equality under the law. Nothing sways them; their brains have been washed clean of the capacity for critical thinking.

If het/cis male rapists want to barge into the Ladies' Room, a dress-code won't stop them, but seriously, how often does that ever happen? Some of the people who use the Ladies' Room like ladies, and some of the people who use the Men's Room like men - that's nobody's business unless they're acting creepy. In over 50 years of regularly using gym and pool locker rooms and public Ladies' Rooms, I have never seen anyone act creepy in them.

It's trans girls who would be endangered by this stupid bathroom bill that would force them to use the Mens Room. They'd be risking a beating, rape or murder every time they had to pee, especially with the GOP Nazis whipping up the froth of homophobia and issuing pardons in advance for Christianist hate-crimes. But then one also has to wonder how the little boys of America will feel about using the urinal in the presence of strangers in skirts and heels.

Heh, one good thing that could come out of all of this for women: if some people of the feminine persuasion can use the Boy's Loo, why can't the rest of us? It's invariably far less crowded, and doesn't smell any worse.

A simple, logical solution would be to have urinals in a separate room from the locking stalls, and to have stalls and/or curtains in the showers. My YMCA also has curtained dressing-stalls in the locker rooms, for those who prefer not to get nekkid in public: it ain't rocket science.

The actual outcome is to purge public bathrooms of people who aren't gender-conforming, because neither bathroom is safe for them -- even more than today. It's not which bathroom, it's neither bathroom. So the apparent illogic of "why can't het cis male creeps come into women's rooms under cover of all the trans men" is not illogic, because the trans men aren't actually there to provide cover. And the bathroom policers know how this goes. It's logical, if you don't want trans people to exist in public bathrooms or public spaces more generally.

Ah, I see what you mean, and you're quite right - the true purpose of 'bathroom bills' has nothing whatsoever to do with making anybody safer; it's all about making trans folk less safe.

I don't think most people who support such bills understand that, though, or would agree that that's the true purpose. They've been led to believe that transmen are a danger to their wimmen and chillun, and they really do believe that; logic be damned.

The irony is that it seems to be all cis women who are now bringing lawsuits against the 'bathroom police' who yanked them out of the Ladies' Room for looking too androgynous. That too is "a feature, not a bug" to the Christianist extremists pushing such bills: they've been fighting for a hundred years to roll back womens' right to wear pants.

Article's 100% right that it does no good to say "but hypocrisy" to someone who's already convinced against you. Nobody in this world ever had their mind changed by having their hypocrisy pointed out.

This may not be what you meant from the article at all, but Its solution is terrible advice!

The right way is simple. Go to the people you need to convince—the ones who aren’t willing to resort to any dirty trick—and say “look, these people are liars. Everything they say, and everything they do, is a lie.”

First, it would make you sound like the unhinged and unreasonable side, but that's a minor point. The big tactical problem is that you don't change someone's mind by tearing down a thing they at least partly believe. They typically react by defending it. If you think they're not a lost cause, it's because they share some reality and morality with you, so build from there to get what you believe in, and that pushes aside the lie. Only there do they start to have any real chance of seeing that the lie is a lie and what purpose its creation served.

()As far as persuasion tactics, I think this article probably is a lot of it, but it overstates how practical it is to do -- which explains why some of their examples are kind of terrible and wouldn't convince a fly.)

It's not about either, in my opinion; I think the issue is "I bet liberals would support the right of trans folks to use the correct bathrooms but MOST people think trans is icky! So we can look like the good defenders of normality, and accuse liberals of being icky defenders of highly visibly unusual people - and what says 'possible danger' to the lizard brain more than something highly visibly unusual?"